Should companies hire a growth team before achieving product-market fit?

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

The biggest mistake founders make with growth teams is hiring because they need growth rather than because they already have growth

49:44 20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023

Finding product market fit is the founder's primary job and should not be outsourced to a growth team; a growth team larger than one person should only be staffed after clear product market fit and escape velocity

In the beginning the growth function is really the sales team, the founder, and maybe one early-career analytical generalist running experiments

Scope: in my view

17:48 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

The first growth hire should come after a couple million in revenue, once early adopters are handled and at least one channel is scaled

Without enough data the growth team can't learn, and if the growth team can't learn you shouldn't hire one

45:55 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane

Harry Stebbings · Dec 6, 2023

Growth teams should only come after product-market fit.

It is the one commonality across all 20 growth episodes he has recorded.

8:26 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

You should not make any growth hire before product-market fit

Growth is about scaling product-market fit sustainably, so if there is nothing to scale yet there is nothing for the hire to do

29:53 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024

On this podcast, essentially every guest has said the right timing for hiring a growth lead or growth team is post-product-market-fit, though one guest argued for hiring growth pre-PMF because you sometimes need to create demand to understand what product market fit and what resonates even is

28:25 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · Jan 18, 2023

Early growth hires can help a company find product-market fit, contrary to the common line that growth isn't a solution to PMF.

A growth hire who tests several channels can discover that your actual ICP differs from the one you assumed, surfacing signals of product-market fit you didn't know you had

18:16 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Harry Stebbings · Aug 16, 2023

Founders should hire growth before product-market fit, not after

You need enough people driving volume at the machine to generate the data that tells you whether some segment actually liked the product

Scope: stated as a contrarian view against the consensus

15:35 20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Harry Stebbings · Sep 20, 2024

Someone the speaker interviewed argued that a company should hire a growth team pre product-market fit, on the grounds that PMF is about getting data on what works and growth people increase the supply of data

Product market fit is about getting the data to determine what works and what doesn't, and growth people increase the supply side of data

6:43 20Growth: The 7 Core Levers to Win at Consumer Subscription: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Packaging, Notifications, Discounts, Paywalls | The Breakdown with Phil Carter

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024

The biggest growth mistake first-time founders make is mistiming growth — starting far too late when product-market fit is very strong, or investing in growth before PMF exists

Companies with strong PMF coast on inbound revenue until doubling gets hard, and then building growth, ops and engineering teams takes so long they lose a year or several quarters

65:37 20Growth: How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprise, How to Assess "Bets" in Growth; Which to Take and Which to Not with Gonto, Interim CMO @ Vercel

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Founders waste enormous amounts of money and talent on the same repeatable mistakes — waiting too long to hire a head of growth, hiring for a dazzling resume, and building a big complicated product before validating it with the market

As a VC he watched brilliant entrepreneurs make these same mistakes over and over on things he knew wouldn't work

50:51 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Brian Balfour · Aug 16, 2023

Whether to hire a dedicated growth person before product-market fit depends on the type of growth machine: marketing-driven products need one from day one, while product/virality-driven products can wait until post-PMF

You need enough volume in the system to learn what the levers are, but for product-driven viral products that volume work looks like the early product and engineering team, whereas a marketing-led model requires a different skill set to drive volume

Scope: depends on what you mean by a growth person and what machine you're building

16:07 20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Harry Stebbings · Aug 16, 2023

The right timing for a growth hire is entirely company-dependent

18:22 20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

To attract a strong growth leader, a founder should already have engineers/PMs/designers assigned to growth with demonstrated success, rather than waiting for the leader to arrive before allocating resources

The candidate needs proof that growth is genuinely prioritized and that they won't face structural hurdles; letting them talk to the existing growth team confirms it

11:40 Pre allocate engineers pms and designers to growth before hiring a leader to attract talent

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

Founders should not try to recruit a head of growth while still in the 'kindle' phase; a head of growth is for scaling ('starting the fire')

Kindling requires thousands of bespoke strategies, while scale strategies are few and specialized; you won't be able to recruit a growth leader at the kindling stage anyway

12:46 Head of growth hire belongs at scaling not at the kindling stage

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

If a product has social, collaboration or network-effect dynamics, founders should hire a growth PM earlier than the standard 'find PMF first' advice — even pre-Series A.

For such products viral growth is almost part of the product itself, so hiring early lets you engineer growth loops into the product; a founder she advised hired a growth PM from Dropbox and that work helped him raise his next round

17:12 Network effect and collaboration products need an early growth pm to engineer viral loops into the product

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Needing data is not a valid reason to hire a growth team early — an early growth team will deliver sign-ups and engagement but likely the wrong users

People respond to incentives; if the team's goal is sign-ups and engagement they will optimize for that rather than long-term business viability, and any non-revenue KPI can be gamed

46:30 Needing data is not a valid reason to hire growth early since the team will optimize the wrong metric

Phil Carter · Sep 20, 2024

The best growth leaders often emerge internally from engineering, analytics or product rather than being hired as growth specialists, and can emerge even at pre-PMF companies

The traits that matter are intellectual curiosity and drive to understand why growth is happening in a given area, channel or segment — often found in bright, hungry people earlier in their careers; Jason VanderMeuw at Strava joined as an early engineer and became a founding member of the growth team

6:58 Growth leaders emerge internally even at pre pmf companies

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

You can start a growth function with a single engineer rather than a leader, provided you define one core metric for that engineer to obsess over

He has talked to great companies that did exactly this, e.g. founders who put one engineer on improving retention, with the person reporting up to the founder

8:15 Start growth with a single engineer focused on one core metric rather than a leader or team

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Growth has a real role pre-product-market-fit, because growth thinking can be instilled in the product roadmap rather than being an afterthought — building features specifically designed to acquire users

Genius.com (formerly Rap Genius) entered a crowded lyrics market and won by adding annotations, which made their pages richer in content so they outranked established competitors — a feature built to outcompete, not just to serve users

9:34 Growth thinking should be embedded in the product roadmap pre pmf via acquisition designed features

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Growth work pre-product-market-fit is usually a waste of energy and resources

Pre-PMF founders' actual problem is building a great product, obsessing over customer feedback and finding a use case a group of customers will use on an ongoing basis — not acquiring users at scale

12:03 Growth work pre pmf wastes resources since founders real job is finding pmf not acquiring users

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Prior guests' advice to hire growth leaders is skewed because they come from companies like Shopify, HubSpot and Segment that can attract top growth talent, which small startups cannot

Those companies have huge budgets and brand appeal; little startups have no brand recognition, little money, and sus equity, so they simply can't hire a growth genius at that stage

28:54 Advice to hire growth leaders is biased since guests come from brand name companies inaccessible to small startups